nightswimming (deserves a quiet night)
by misandrywitch
Summary: 'I don't know what "I love you" means. I think it means "Don't leave me here alone"'- Neil Gaiman (Lying low at Lupin's)


The sun is setting with slow, inevitable gravity, a huge scarlet flare in a stained sky. Its double, shimmering on the surface of the silver edge of the sea (intersected with a rocky coastline and the small, clean lines of a rooftop), wavers and elongates into a stranger, paler version of itself.

Sitting on the back porch, well hidden from the town and the road and the world, really, you sympathize.

There's a briny breeze blowing in from the coast and the air is filled with the quiet, comforting rhythm of the ocean. It was never quiet in Azkaban. Someone was always screaming, and your thoughts were always far too loud. You are nervous of the quiet; you do not sit comfortably with your own memories. But here is the ocean, consistent. You're wearing a pair of clothes that don't belong to you; the pants are too long and fraying around the knees, the shoulders of the sweater slightly too narrow. You're living in borrowed clothes and you feel, a little, like you're living on borrowed time.

You also feel like you're alive for the first time in a long time.

There is movement in the tiny kitchen behind you and Remus comes out onto the porch, worn leather shoes sliding on shiny wooden slats. A hand, with neat trimmed nails and old white scars, brushes your shoulder.

"That's my favourite jumper," he says wryly.

"Sorry," you tell him. "It's comfortable." Remus spends his days working, a little job in a little library that fits the quiet, little life the inhabitants of the tiny Welsh town associate him with. He had been gone when you'd woken and you'd chosen the sweater from his wardrobe. It smells like him; Earl grey tea and book dust. It's something that hasn't changed. It's something you had almost forgotten, that had come flooding back to you that night in June when Remus had seized your hand and embraced you for the first time in twelve years.

He smiles and leans his arms on the railing of the desk and you both stare out to sea. The wind ruffles your hair, which is long, almost to your elbows, and then his, which isn't. Shockingly, your hair has stayed black. Remus's is streaked with grey, has been since he was seventeen. It catches the light from the vanishing sun and refracts it; it outlines the lines on his face and turns his eyelashes gold. He looks old, and you know you look old, thin and drawn and tired. Still, his smile is sweet, if a little sad.

"Something's on your mind," you venture. Remus's eyes are the color of warm tea. He carries cities, and centuries, in them. There are years in his life that you do not have, years where he went places and saw things and met people you never will. Still, you know him well enough to see the weight of something heavy in his eyes and the set of his narrow shoulders.

He hesitates, visibly. He's been doing that more than he ever used to. You speak less. You used to talk all the time; to amuse, to anger, to fill dead air. Lately, you've let the ocean fill the silence and Remus has never pushed you.

"Moony," you say and he melts visibly with your use of the old nickname, one of the only things left of that time.

"Let's take a walk," he says and doesn't wait for your response. There is a winding narrow path lined with white stones that drops down the cliffs to the ocean. The beaches are rarely crowded because there isn't much beach; in most places, the cliffs plunge directly to the sea. Right below Remus's tiny house, though, is a small sandy inlet. You visited him a few times as a kid, following this same path and splashing in the chilly water before sprawling yourself on the sand and rolling in it until you were prickly all over. You've walked down there a couple of times on your own, but it doesn't feel the same.

Nothing feels the same, not even Remus. Especially not Remus. But you walk down the path as the sun sinks lower, a few steps behind him. The wind picks up and tangles your hair into your eyes and you think about changing, twisting into another, easier form. You've spent a lot of time as a dog. They have much simpler minds. But you don't. Remus has something to say, is using the walk and the wind and the water to gather his words.

When you reach the sand, you kick off the shoes you're wearing and roll up the trouser legs. The water soaks them anyway when you wade in and a wave swells higher than you thought it would go. It isn't cold, so you wade in deeper. Remus toes off his own shoes and removes his socks, placing them in a neat pile next to yours. He rolls his own pants up. He has tight, lanky muscles in his calves. He even has scars on the tops of his feet.

You stand side by side in the water and your hand finds his; his fingers are warm and thin and strong. Remus feels like an anchor; you know, because he's told you, that your presence makes him feel like he's been saved from drowning.

"I got a letter from Dumbledore today," he says. "He wants to use Grimmauld place, like you suggested."

You experience a momentary twinge of annoyance that Dumbledore didn't tell you this himself, but you shove it down and dig your toes into the cold, wet sand. Sand; one more thing you thought you'd never experience again. "I can't wait," you roll your eyes. Remus snorts.

"Things are happening. Things are moving," he says, a minute later. "I'm worried, Sirius."

"I know," you respond. Remus worries. It's his default setting. He seems to think if he isn't worrying about something else he'll turn his incredibly analytical brain on himself.

_You are always your own worst critic, _you think sadly.

"I've been thinking, I've just—" he pauses and kicks at a drift of foam. It sprays upwards and outwards. "I've been thinking a lot about the decisions I made, then." Remus turns his face away from you, towards the last light of the sun sinking beyond the lip of the sea, leaving the sky purple and blue and black in its wake.

You have too, but then again your decisions have been cycling through your mind in the dark for twelve years.

"I should have been braver," Remus's voice is almost lost to the wind. "If I hadn't been so scared maybe- maybe I could have put enough together to get you out of prison. Maybe I could have seen what was really important, if I hadn't been scared to look." He meets your eyes, the dearest and most familiar sight in the world.

"I wouldn't waste your energy wishing things were different," you tell him. "They're here. They are how they are."

"I should have had more faith," Remus says. "And now—now it's starting over again and I can't let it—I can't. I can't." He shuts his mouth and its corners turn down, a tight narrow line in his face.

"Moony," you say severely. "Shut the fuck up."

One of Remus's eyebrows twitch, and he sighs. His sigh is so familiar that it tugs at your heart; it is as comfortable and safe to you as his laugh, his yawns, the sounds he makes when you are about to push him over the edge. The world is right on its axis when Sirius Black does something silly and Remus Lupin sighs about it. It has been off-kilter for so long (you think of Peter, of Dumbledore, of holding James's cold hand for the last time as his son wailed with blood streaming down his face from a lightning bolt cut on his forehead). Remus sighs, and it rights itself, slowly.

And then, because you feel silly and the water is warm and you want to hear him sigh again, you jump forward, changing as you go. Two big hairy paws hit Remus square in the chest and you both topple backwards into the foam. By the time his head pops up out of the water you are a man again, and laughing as you shake your soggy hair out of your eyes.

"WHAT," Remus spits sand and seawater. "THE FUCK." He spits more. "WAS THAT."

You splash him. He blink water out of his eyes, and sighs and then flings briny water into your face. You lunge at him and you both grapple around in the water and Remus is laughing breathlessly and you've worked your fingers underneath his squelchy sweater. You rotate so you're lying with the sand at your back and Remus and the sky in your eyes.

"You should be careful," his breath gusts across your face and his lips are inches from yours. You want to kiss them, so you do. "I'm an old man. You could have broken a hip."

"You're just fine."

"You smell disgusting, like a wet dog. I'm never going to get the smell out of that sweater," he says, but his eyes are twinkling. He has a very old, deep scar on his left hip and you trace it with your finger. Later, tonight, you'll trace it with your tongue. The sun is gone now and the sky is clear; stars gleam overhead and dance on the water. Stars. Another thing you thought you'd never see again. Sand and stars and Remus. His knee slides between yours.

"This is what matters," you say. Water clings to Remus's eyelashes and your hair is filled with sand. "This. Now. I regret things too Moony, I—I regret so much. Everything, sometimes."

"I know," Remus's fingers drift across your face to your eyebrows, your hairline, your lips. It is warm, as balmy as Wales ever gets, but you shiver.

"But we're stuck with this. That's all we've got. This time we can get it right, Moony. We can get it right."

Remus's mouth twists, an expression you know in your sleep. You know all his expressions, his moods, his favorite words and where he was born and what he fears deepest in his heart. You know Remus better than you know yourself. Today, you know him better than you ever did before.

He is one of the few things that remain that are yours; Remus and Harry and an ancient house in London that you hate. You are one of the few things that remain that are his; you and his tiny cottage on the cliffs. And the wolf.

"Yeah," he says. "We can get it right."

He kisses you on the corner of your mouth and he tastes like coffee and salt and it feels like coming home.


End file.
